Managing Google Apps for an entire organization is not always a one-size-fits-all job. Google Apps Administrators often need to securely share management responsibilities with others. These users may need to have access to certain administrative privileges like user creation, password resets or managing groups, but not to all of them. To address these needs, we’re launching Delegated Admin to our Business and Edu customers. With this new feature, your primary administrators or “Super Admins” can now offer other users specific administration controls.

Lukas Karlsson of the the Broad Institute summed it up, “I like the fact that I can create additional administrator accounts and grant them access to certain administrative functions without having to make them full-fledged administrators. Our organization is growing quite large and, as that happens, we want to grant more folks access to specific tabs in the control panel, so this is very useful.”

Joseph Dellano of Tempus Nova, Inc. believes, “this will be well-used by enterprises that have specific people in charge of of responsibilities like mailing list administration.” Specifically, a Super Admin can create a help desk for your organization by granting other administrators the minimal access necessary to do their jobs. Consider an example:

Collin is an IT Associate at your company who is responsible for helping employees who have lost their password or username. You can now give Collin the ability to access the “Organization & Users” tab in the Control Panel, so that he can manage user access to Google Apps. You can also further control which actions he has the right to perform. For example, you may give Collin the right to reset passwords, but not to create new user accounts.

With these customizable privileges, Delegated Administration is another way you can tailor Google Apps to your business needs. To get started today:

Log in to the Google Apps administrator control panel

Under “Organization and Users,” find and click on the user account to which you wish to grant privileges

Click the “Privileges” tab

To make the user a Super Admin select the check box labeled “This user has full administrative rights within this Control Panel.” To restrict the user's access to selected functions the Control Panel, select the check boxes next to the tabs you want the user to access

Select the specific actions the user is allowed to perform under each tab

Click “Save changes” to confirm that you want to grant administrator access to the user

When the user signs into the control panel, only the Dashboard and the selected tabs will appear in the menu bar. The user will have administrator access to the settings you granted them, but nothing more.

We look forward to continuing to make it easier to help Google Apps administrators share tasks across teams and Help Desks.